《Lange’s Commentary on the Holy Scriptures – John (Ch. 4~Ch. 8》(Johann P. Lange) 04 Chapter 4

Waiting for the moving of the water.—See the textual note above. On this passage together with the next verse, criticism has four theories:

1. All is spurious; a later interpolation of the popular belief for the explanation of John 5:7. This is favored by (a) the omission of the whole locus in B. C,* 157, 314, and in the Coptic and Sahidic V.;^[FN44] (b) the many variations in the several expressions, see Tischendorf; (c) the many ἅπαξ λεγόμενα as κίνησις, ταραχή etc.; (d) the stamp of popular tradition upon the statement; (e) “If the passage were genuine, it would not have been omitted.” Lücke, Olshausen, Tischendorf, Meyer. [Tregelles, Alford, Westcott and Hort.—P. S.]

2. The whole doubtful passage is genuine, (a) In favor of the close of John 5:3, Cod. D, etc.; in favor John 5:4, Cod. A, etc. Tertullian,^[FN45] the Peshito (b) The insertion could not well be accounted for, Baumgarten-Crusius, Brückner,^[FN46] Lachmann, [Reuss, Lange, Hengstenberg].

3. The close, of John 5:3, ἑκδεχ.—κίνησιν, is genuine, John 5:4, a later addition. This is favored by (a) the omission in D, where the close of John 5:3 remains; (b) the consideration that without this passage John 5:7 would be unintelligible. Ewald, Tholuck, [Godet].

4. The close of John 5:3 is spurious, John 5:4 is genuine; being more strongly supported by A. C.* So Hofmann.

It is of great weight, (1) that Tertullian stands so early a witness for the whole text. He ought not to be estimated here according to his realistic view elsewhere, but as reporting a document which was sacred to him.^[FN47] (2) that John 5:7 would be in fact unintelligible without John 5:4. (3) that John 5:4 is more strongly attested than the close of John 5:3, particularly by Code A. (4) that the close of John 5:3 might have been carried away with John 5:4, when the latter was omitted. (5) that the silence of Origen leaves us to suppose that the Alexandrian school found the passage offensive for its realism.

On the other hand John 5:4 cannot be sustained (a) by Hofmann’s doctrine of angels, which makes angels the agents in all second causes, or natural phenomena; (b) by Tholuck’s observation that John himself would no doubt have explained that natural phenomenon, as the Christian and the general religious popular opinion explained it in the second century, especially after what the Apocalypse says of the angel of the waters and of fire ( John 16:5; John 14:18). The Revelation, like the book of Daniel, is a symbolical book.

The matter is no doubt to be thus explained: According to the Jewish popular conception there was a personal angel who produced the moving of the water. John found the conception and admitted it in his narrative, translating in his own mind the personal angel into a symbolical angel, or a distinct divine operation, i. e., in reference to such facts, for in a higher sphere he well knew the personal angels. He could leave the reader to adjust the passage according to John 1:51.^[FN48]

John 5:4. Troubled the water.—According to Wolcott on Arabian substituted for the angel in the fountain of the Virgin “the convolutions of a dragon at the bottom.” Tholuck, p161. [The common legend is that a great dragon lies within the intermittent Fountain of the Virgin; when he is awake, he stops the water; but when he sleeps, it flows. See Robinson, I. p342; Porter, I, 140.—P. S.]

First after the troubling.—The popular religious idea of the periodical moments of healing efficacy in the spring.

John 5:5. Thirty-eight years [τριάκοντα καὶ ὀκτὼ ἔτη ἔχων ἐν τῇ ἀσθενείᾳ αὐτοῦ].—It is a question whether ἕχων is to be referred to the thirty-eight years, or to ἐν τῇ ἀσθ [that Isaiah, whether the exact expression Isaiah, he had so many years in his infirmity,=ἔχων τριάμκοντα κ. ὁ. ἐ., or had his infirmity for so many years=ἀσθενῶς ἕχων], The usage of John is in favor of the former ( John 5:6; John 8:57; John 11:17; comp. Lücke, II. p25). He had lived thirty-eight years in his impotency. [He had been sick thirty-eight years—not at Bethesda all that time. The long disease makes the cure appear all the greater. Hengstenberg allegorizes here again, and discovers in the sick man of Bethesda a symbol of the Jewish nation, and in the thirty-eight years of his sickness a symbol of the thirty-eight years which Israel spent under the bane in the wilderness (I:300 f.). So also Wordsworth in loc.—P. S.]

John 5:6. And knew.—Γνούς when He perceived. We cannot venture to assert, with Meyer, that this does not intend supernatural knowledge. A natural medium there might have been; the insight into the whole situation partook of the supernatural. The indefinite πολὺν χρόνον also indicates this. [So also Hengstenberg, Godet and Alford.—P. S.]

Desirest thou to be made whole?—Meyer: “The question is asked to excite the attention and expectation of the suffering man. Paulus falsely: The man had been a malicious beggar, who represented himself as sick; wherefore Jesus asked him with reproving emphasis, Desirest thou to be made whole? Art thou in earnest? Similarly Ammon; whereas Lange takes him only for a man of faint will, whose slumbering energy of will Christ here aroused again (?); of which the text gives as little sign, as that the question was intended for the whole people of whom this invalid was a type (Luthardt).”But the following points are clearly implied in the narrative, as Meyer himself must admit: (1) that in this miracle of healing alone an unasked offer occurs, though in John 9. there is an unasked healing (yet every honest beggar virtually asks the greatest possible alms); (2) that, besides, the man always allows himself to be anticipated by all others, though he is still able feebly to walk; (3) that he complains in a feeble manner without point; (4) that he lets his benefactor slip away, without learning his name, or even eagerly asking it, and then, against the Jews, appeals only to the command of Jesus; (5) that he receives from Jesus in the temple a warning, which implied a fickle character; (6) that immediately after his recognition of Jesus he goes to the Jews and gives the name of his miraculous healer, though he must have observed their evil designs. All this is in the test. Yet malevolence properly so called cannot be asserted. His continuance at the pool of Bethesda leads us to recognize in his indolence a spark of spiritual patience; in his helpless and forlorn condition he appears a very peculiar object of sympathy; his visiting the temple seems to bespeak a sense of gratitude; even in his giving of the name of Jesus a mistaken obedience may have had a share; but exegesis cannot make him a valiant confessor. [The question of Jesus, addressed to the cripple’s desire for health, was a proof of sympathy with his sufferings, and kindled a spark of hope when on the brink of despair, and thus naturally prepared the way for his cure.—P. S.]

John 5:7. Another goeth flown before me.—Meyer: “The brief motion must be conceived as limited to a particular point of the pool, so that only one at a time can receive the benefit.” But there is nothing of this in the text; and motion in a pool cannot possibly be confined to a particular point, Rather might the stairs have been constructed on the presumption that only one bather would receive healing. In John 5:4 Meyer, without warrant, sees the apocryphal expression of a superstitious popular opinion. [Alford: “The man’s answer implies the popular belief, which the spurious but useful insertion in John 5:3-4 expresses.”—P. S.]

John 5:8. Rise, take up thy bed,^[FN49] and walk.—Three words of power in one wonderful work, or even three thunder strokes of the might of the divine healing will, which awaken at once the faint will and the worn-out energy of the deceased man. The words of healing addressed to the paralytic in Matthew 9, are similar indeed, in Mark ( John 2) the very same, yet they have here a different import; they are intended to give threefold vividness to the outward visibility of the power of Jesus in proof of His invisible work of grace on the heart of the sufferer. The criticism of Strauss and Weisse, which can make of this story a legendary exaggeration of the healing of that paralytic, shows more than mere indifference to place, time, and circumstances, and all connected with them; it confounds a true heroic faith with the most weak-minded inclination to faith, and a man who causes his friends to break through the roof with a Prayer of Manasseh, who can find no one even to put him into the water. Critical opinions of this sort themselves lie like blind, lame, and withered about the pool of Bethesda. [Against Baur and Hilgenfeld see Meyer, p221 f.]

John 5:9. And on that day was the Sabbath.—A twofold scruple might arise, one against the healing, another against the carrying. In reference to the healing, the principle universally prevailed: “All danger or preservation of life removes the Sabbath restrictions” (Omne dubium vitæ pellit Sabbatum); though this principle was so encumbered with casuistic distinctions and exceptions that in most cases it was not possible for the laity duly to distinguish the lawful and the unlawful, the forbidden and the allowed (Lücke, II, p29). So too the carrying of articles on the Sabbath Isaiah, according to the Talmud, not indeed absolutely forbidden, but was at most allowed only under many restrictions; for one thing it could not be done on the open street (see Tholuck).

John 5:10. The Jews.—[Not the people, but those in authority who misrepresented the people in their rejection of Christ]. In such cases the matter goes quickly through fanatics, informers, and subordinates to the chiefs. Here the hierarchical chiefs already seem to speak; according to Meyer and Tholuck, the Sanhedrists. Yet it is possible that the matter only gradually reached them. At first they attack only the man himself for his carrying, which was the most palpable.

John 5:11. He that made me whole.—Beyond the word ἐκεῖνος, no trace again of individual energy appears in the answer, nothing but historical statement. Unquestionably the words seem to say: One who made me whole, a wonder-worker, must certainly have had the right to heal me. Hence Meyer: They savor of defiance; Tholuck: The man puts the authority of the Wonder-worker as in John 9:30 against theirs. But the character of the blind man in John 9. is at least an entirely different one from this. That man makes bold to draw inferences, this one does not, and the sentence before us, according to the connection, may be taken as well for an excusing of himself by the strange injunction of the strange Prayer of Manasseh, as for anything else. At all events this man seems not to make head against the Jews. It must be remembered, too, that he could not otherwise designate Jesus, since he did not know His name.

John 5:12. Who is the man that?—Not only is the contemptuous expression the Man^[FN50] characteristic, but also the fact that they seem entirely to ignore the miraculous healing itself. [They do not ask: ‘Who is he that healed thee?’ but they carefully bring out the unfavorable side of what had taken place, as malicious persons always do.—Alford.]

John 5:13 f. And he that was healed knew not.—Bengel’s apology: “Grabbato ferendo intentus et judaica interpellations districtus,” says less than the rest of the verse itself, for Jesus had withdrawn himself,^[FN51] Meyer incorrectly: He withdrew “when this collision with the Jews arose.” This would be at least a very equivocal course, to forsake one who was attacked on His account; this Jesus never did. He turned aside because a multitude was there, whose demonstrations He wished to avoid; perhaps the treatment of this invalid also required it.

John 5:14. Jesus findeth him in the temple.—Chrysostom, Tholuck, Meyer: The healing made a religious impression upon him, Yet the evangelist seems intentionally to imply that this meeting did not immediately follow; he writes μετὰ ταῦτα, not μετὰ τιῦτο.^[FN52] And the address of Christ to him does not indicate a man thoroughly possessed with gratitude. Sin no more, lest, etc.—An unusually earnest injunction upon one whom He had healed, notwithstanding He finds him in the temple. Hence, too, it cannot be supposed that no more is intended here than merely the general connection of sin with evil (Iren. Adv. hær., v15; Bucer, Calov, Neander). This interpretation on the contrary, is no doubt a false application of John 9:3. Here a special connection between a particular kind of sin and the particular disease must have existed, according to Chrysostom, Bullinger, Meyer, and others. Neither the special sin nor the special disease is known; which magnifies the penetrating knowledge of the Lord.^[FN53] But a sin which produced disease thirty-eight years before, may be designated in general even in an old man as a sin of youth. Lest something worse befall thee.—Bengel: “Gravius quiddam quam infirmitas 38 annorum.” [Trench: The χεῖρον τι “gives us an awful glimpse of the severity of God’s judgments.” Comp. Matthew 12:45.]

John 5:15. The man departed.—Strictly: Then departed the man; ὁ ἄνθρωπος. Chrysostom concludes that it was not ingratitude which moved him to this; that he had spoken before the Jews not of carrying his bed, but of that which they cared least to hear: that Jesus had healed him. This apology falls, when we consider his former declaration. There he described the unknown man by the words, He that made me whole. For this reason he now says in giving his information: He that made me whole is Jesus. Meyer explains: the motive is neither malice (Schleiermacher, Lange [incorrect citation; Comp. Leben Jesu, II. p769], Paulus, etc.), nor gratitude wishing to get Jesus acknowledged among the Jews (Cyril, Chrysostom), nor obedience to the rulers (Bengel, Lücke, De Wette, Luthardt), but his authority (Jesus) is to him forthwith higher than that of the Sanhedrists, and he braves them with it. (Thus this man would be a hero, while Nicodemus is supposed to be hampered.) According to Tholuck the man is somewhat stupid and without suspicion of the rulers. Probably he added to weakness of heart and ignorance a fear of the Jews, in which he sought to shield himself from their reproach without perceiving that he might be prejudicing. It is worthy of notice, that they probably let his case drop, while the blind man in chap9. they in the end excommunicate; that here in fact they even base upon the statement of this man a process against Jesus.

John 5:16. For this cause the Jews persecuted Jesus.—What follows evidently refers to a trial (Lampe, Rosenmüller, Kuiuoel; against Meyer [and Alford]; comp. Luke 21:12, διώκειν used of judicial process), though the terms are so chosen as at the same time to express the continuance of the persecutions after the failure of the process. Probably Jesus was arraigned before the little Sanhedrin. Winer: “There were smaller colleges of this name (Sanhedrin, the little Sanhedrin), consisting of twenty-three counsellors (according to Sanhedrin, 1, 6) in every Palestinean city which numbered more than one hundred and twenty inhabitants; in Jerusalem even two (Sanhedr. 11, 2).” But of these, as also of the courts of three, to which the cognizance and punishment of lighter offences pertained, Josephus knows nothing; whereas he mentions a court of seven (Antiq. iv8, 14) in the provincial cities, which always had among its members two from the tribe of Levi ( Matthew 5:21; Matthew 10:17). The variations in the form of the little Sanhedrin amount, however, to nothing; enough that it existed.

Because he did^[FN54] these things; ταῦτα.—They craftily combine the two charges: (1) the healing of the invalid on the Sabbath, and (2) the commanding him to carry his bed, in the single indictment for breaking the Sabbath in various ways: thus covering the main fact that He had wrought a miracle. Concerning the restriction of healing by the Sabbath regulations of the Pharisees, see above on John 5:9.

[On the Sabbath, ἐν σαββάτῳ.—This was the cause of offence and brings out, in connection with John 5:17, the difference between the then prevailing Jewish and the Christian idea of Sabbath observance. The former is negative and slavish, the latter positive and free. The Pharisees scrupulously adhered to the letter of the fourth commandment as far as it forbid any (common) work, and hedged it around with all sorts of hair-splitting distinctions and rabbinical restrictions, but they violated its spirit which demands the positive sanctification of the Sabbath by doing good. The rest of the Sabbath is not the rest of idleness or mere cessation from labor, else God Himself who is always at work ( John 5:17), would be a Sabbath-breaker as well as Christ. It is rather rest in God, a rest from ordinary work in order to a higher and holier activity for the glory of God and the good of man. We must cease from our earthly work, that God may do His heavenly work in and through us. The Sabbath law, like the whole law, is truly fulfilled by love to God and love to man. Christ refutes the false conception of Sabbath rest, as a mere cessation from labor, in various ways, now by the example of David eating the show-bread, now by the example of the priests working in the temple, now by the readiness of the Jews to deliver an ox out of a pit on the Sabbath. Here He takes higher ground and claims equality with the Father who never ceases doing good. God’s rest after creation was not a rest of sleep or inaction, but a rest of joy in the completion of His work and of benediction of His creatures. “God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it.” ( Genesis 2:3). His strictly creative activity ceased with the Hexaëmeron, but his world-preserving and governing, as well as His redeeming activity continues without interruption, and this is properly His Sabbath, combining the highest action with the deepest repose. In the case of man while on earth abstinence from the distracting multiplicity of secular labor and toil is only the necessary condition for attending to his spiritual interests. Acts of worship and acts of charity are proper works for the Christian Sabbath, and are refreshing rest to body and soul, carrying in themselves their own exceeding great reward. The eternal Sabbath of God’s people will be unbroken rest in worship and love, as Augustine says, at the close of his Civitas Dei: “There we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise.” Christ never violated the fourth or any other commandment of God, in its true divine meaning and intent, but fulfilled it by doctrine and example ( Matthew 5:17). He emancipated us from the slavery of the negative, superstitious and hypocritical sabbatarianism of the Pharisees, and set us an example of the true positive observance of the Sabbath by doing good; the Sabbath being made for man ( Mark 2:27), i. e., for his temporal and eternal benefit. This was its purpose when God instituted it, together with the marriage relation, in the state of man’s innocence, and this Christ has restored, as He restored the marriage relation to its original purity. The commentators pass too slightly over this point, and some of them misconstrue Christ’s and Paul’s opposition to the Jewish sabbatarianism of that age into a violation or abrogation of the fourth commandment.^[FN55] Trench, in his work on Miracles, p206 (Am. ed.), has some good remarks on John 5:16, which I shall transfer here:

“ ‘The Jews,’ not here the multitude, but some among the spiritual heads of the nation, whom it is very noticeable that St. John continually characterizes by this name, (1:19; 7:1; 9:22; 18:12, 14) find fault with the man for carrying his bed in obedience to Christ’s command, their reason being because ‘the same day’ on which the miracle was accomplished ‘was the Sabbath;’ and the carrying of any burden was one of the expressly prohibited works of that by Hero, indeed, they had apparently an Old Testament ground to go upon, and an interpretation of the Mosaic law from the lips of a prophet, to justify their interference, and the offence which they took. But the man’s bearing of his bed was not a work by itself; it was merely the corollary, or indeed the concluding act of his healing, that by which he should make proof himself, and give testimony to others of its reality. It was lawful to heal on the Sabbath day; it was lawful then to do that which was immediately involved in and directly followed on the healing. And here lay ultimately the true controversy between Christ and His adversaries, namely, whether it was most lawful to do good on that day, or to leave it undone ( Luke 6:9). Starting from the unlawfulness of leaving good undone, He asserted that He was its true keeper, keeping it as God kept it, with the highest beneficent activity, which in His Father’s case, as in His own, was identical with deepest rest,—and not, as they accused Him of being, its breaker. It was because He Himself had ‘done those things’ (see John 5:16), that the Jews persecuted Him, and not for bidding the man to bear his bed, which was a mere accident and consequence involved in what He himself had wrought.”—P. S.]

John 5:17. My Father worketh until now [ἔως ἄρτι “inde a creatione sine intervallo sabbati” Bengel], and I work also.—A difficult answer. It undoubtedly asserts (1) Christ’s exaltation above the Sabbath law, like Mark 2:28; (2) the conformity of His working to the law of the Sabbath, in other words His fulfilling of the Sabbath law, Matthew 12:12; (3) the relation of the working of God to His own working as its pattern, John 5:20; (4) His working out from God and with God, which makes their charge a charge against God Himself, John 5:19. The last idea has special emphasis. According to Strauss the sentence is Alexandrian. [Philo of Alexandria, in his Treatise on the Allegories of the Sacred Laws, chap. vii. says with regard to the institution of the Sabbath after creation: “God never ceases to work (ποιῶν ὁ θεὸς οὐθέποτε παύεται), but when He appears to do Song of Solomon, He is only beginning the creation of something else; as being not only the Creator, but also the Father of everything which exists.”—P. S.] But Alexandrianism explained only the law of the Sabbath by the eternal working of God. There is a distinction between the creative work of God at the beginning which originates the world, and looks like human effort, and His subsequent festive working in the created world. This way of God, working on the Sabbath the works of the Spirit, works of relief, and love, in incessant divine agility, as it manifests itself in the objective world, must manifest itself also in the Son. According to Tholuck, modern expositors (Grotius, Lücke) stop with the idea that human activity is allowed on the Sabbath. We substitute: Divine activity.

According to Luthardt the words are uttered with reference to the future Sabbath: First the working of the Father, then that, of the Song of Solomon, then that of the Holy Spirit. A correct idea, but not here in place, for according to our text the Father and the Son work simultaneously and together. Meyer: “The subject is not the preserving and governing of the world in general, but the continued activity of God for the salvation of mankind in spite of His Sabbath resting after the creation” ( Genesis 2:1-3). But this is in fact the work of preserving and governing, providentia. Olshausen and De Wette explain: the working of God is rest and activity together, and so it is in Christ. Meyer on the contrary: of rest and contemplation there is not a word. The subject, however, is a divine working which as such is also repose, combining at once activity and festive contemplation. Grotius: It is a relation of imitation. Meyer denies this, contrary to John 5:19; it is only the necessary correlation of volition and execution. The Father’s having the initiative brings in the element of imitation which by no means exhausts the idea of co-operation (so as to reduce it to a mere working side by side after the same manner, as of one God with another). On Hilgenfeld’s discovery of the demiurge, see Meyer [p223 f, 5th ed.].

[Godet compares with this ver. Luke 2:49, and justly remarks that it virtually contains the whole following discourse. It asserts the mysterious union of Christ with God, which Christ had already expressed in His twelfth year to His parents. It is rightly understood by the Jews ( John 5:18), though wrongly construed by them into blasphemy, since they saw in Him a mere man. It is at the same time the most triumphant refutation of the charge of Sabbath-breaking. What a sublime apology this! In charging Me, He says to His adversaries, with breaking the law of God, you charge the Law-giver, my Father, with breaking His own law: for my activity continually and in each moment corresponds to His. Owen remarks on this verse: “There is not the shadow of a doubt, that Jesus did here claim, and intended to claim, absolute equality with the Father. What is here most logically inferred, is distinctly stated, John 1:1; Colossians 1:15-17; Hebrews 1:2-3.”—P. S.]

John 5:18. The Jews sought the more to kill him, etc.—The one complex charge (of Sabbath-breaking) now becomes two, and the second is the greater. He has ascribed to Himself a singular relation to God. By this He is supposed to have blasphemed God and incurred the death of the blasphemer, Leviticus 24:16 (Bengel: “Id misere pro blasphemed habuerunt”). They had already hated Him unto death on the could not easily under the circumstance make out of the Sabbath-breaking, and in their second charge their real intention becomes also the formula one of finding Him guiltu of death. Hence nunc amplius,to interpret for the μὰλλον [Bengel], is more suitable than the magis of Meyer. Amplius means not only insuper, but also appertius. Tholuck incorrectly: the murderous wish still remains informatta. The matter still depended on the inquisition only in so far as the pretended blasphemy seemed to be not sufficiently established by Christ’s expression: My Father. “The name of father, except in the much disputed passage, Job 34:36, and in Psalm 89:26 where it is descriptive, is not used in the Old Testament as a personal name. In the Apocrypha the individual use of the word first begins to develop itself, Wisdom of Solomon 14:3; Sirach 23:1; Sirach 23:4. Otherwise God is only in the national (theocratic) sense Father of the people, and even in the use of the term in this sense there still appears in the century after Christ a certain reserve, etc. Thus this specific calling of God his Father (comp. ἴδιος, Romans 8:32) must have been very striking in his mouth.” Tholuck.

[The Jews correctly understood ὁ πατήρ μου (instead of ἡμῶν) to assert a peculiar and exclusive fatherhood (πατέραἵδιον, patrem proprium) in relation to Jesus such as no mere man could claim, and a peculiar sonship of Jesus such as raised Him above all the children of God and made Him equal in essence with God. (Comp. the μονογενἠς υἱός of John and the ἵδοις υἱός of Paul, Romans 8:32). But regarding Jesus as a mere Prayer of Manasseh, and evidently a man in His sound senses, the Jews charged Him with blasphemy. This is inevitable from their premises. The only logical alternative is: Christ was either a blasphemer, or equal with God. Comp10:33. Alford remarks: “The Jews understood His words to mean nothing short of peculiar personal Sonship, and thus equality of nature with God. And that this their understanding was the right one, the discourse testifies. All might in one sense, and the Jews did in a closer sense, call God their, or our, Father; but they at once said that the individual use of ‘My Father’ by Jesus had a totally distinct, and in their view a blasphemous meaning: this latter especially, because He thus made God a participator in His crime of breaking the Sabbath. Thus we obtain from the adversaries of the faith a most important statement of one of its highest and holiest doctrines.” Augustine says (Tract17): “Ecce intelligunt Judæi, quod non intelligunt Ariani.”—P. S.]

John 5:19. The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father doing,^[FN56] etc.—introduced with Verily, verily; thus opening a new truth. He retracts nothing that He has said, but now, that the question of the Messiah comes up, plants Himself on general ground, and speaks alternately now objectively of the Son and the Father, John 5:19-23; John 5:25-29, now subjectively of Himself and the Father, John 5:24; John 5:30-47. By this changing of the grammatical person, with the perfect identity of the real person, so that the objective sentences assert universal Christological relations, and the subjective His relation to the Jewish rulers,—by this master stroke of self-vindication, not noticed by expositors, He sustains His Wisdom of Solomon, without prejudicing in the least the steadfastness of His confession, and He puts their inquisition in the issue utterly to shame (or makes it a mandatum de supersedendo). Luther: “A beautiful excusatio, making the matter worse.” Tholuck: “Jesus strengthens that which gave offence.” But the turn, with which He does this ought not to be overlooked. The time of His unveiled revelation of Himself as the Messiah was the time of His death: this was not yet come. On the different views of the fathers as to the ensuing discussion, whether it presents the revelation of the Father to the Son in the internal trinitarian aspect, or in the economic, see Tholuck, p165. Tholuck remarο (p97): “In the Gospels, as in Paul, the predicate υἱός is not to be understood of the λὸγος α1σαρλος, but of the ἕναρλος (Nitzsch, System, § 83; Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, I, p173): yet like the Pauline, the Johannean view also regards the Incarnate Word in continuity with the λόγος ἅσαρλος, and hence applies to Him what is said of the former.” It is to be observed that the opposition between eternity and time is not Song of Solomon,abstractly carried out in the Scriptures, as in scholastic theology.

Can do nothing,^[FN57] nothing at all, denotes not only the dependence of the Son on the Father in His working, the negative side of obedience, nor only His imitation of the Father, the formal side of obedience, but also His working at the motion of the Father. The Father is the limit or the law, the Father is the example, and the Father is also the motive, the impulse of His action. The action of the Son is at every point begotten by the action of the Father. The negative side of the obedience of Christ consists in His being unable to do anything of Himself; the positive side consists in His seeing, His intuitive perception of the initiative of the Father (βλέπειν, comp. John 8:38, and ἁφ̓ἑαυτοῦ John 16:13). [Meyer: “In ἀφ’ ἐαυτοῦ we must not find a distinction between the human and the divine will (Beyschlag), nor an indistinct and one-sided reference to the human element in Christ (De Wette), but the whole divine-human subject, the incarnate Logos, with whom there can be no ascitas agendi, no self-determination independent of the Father; otherwise He would be exclusively divine or exclusively human. Hence there is here no contradiction with the Prologue.”—P. S.]

[In like manner, ὁμοίως, excludes the idea of imitation and the analogy of master and servant, or teacher and pupil; it points to the equality of the Son with the Father. The Son does the same things with the same power and in the same manner. He is as the Nicene Creed has it, “God of God,” “very God of very God.”—P. S.] The human analogy of the child doing like the father, is here only distantly alluded to; the main thing is the original priority of the Father even in the Trinity, a point which the Greek church rightly asserts, but falsely exaggerates. [A priority of office and dignity, but not of substance, for this is the same in the three Persons of the Trinity.—P.S.]

John 5:20. For the Father loveth the Son.—Not merely the ethical foundation of what precedes (Meyer), but more than all the substantial.^[FN58] The term φιλεῖν [which always expresses the affection of love] is more personal or individual [and tender] than the more general ethical term ἀγαπᾶν. This φιλεῖν with respect to the Son not merely proceeds from the eternal relation of the Father to the Song of Solomon, it is the foundation of this relation itself.

And it manifests itself in the Father’s showing the Son all things.^[FN59] The showing of the Father answers to the seeing of the Son. It is the absolute self-revelation of God in His acting, in its teleological working. The Son sees the Father in all His works, and sees what He intends by the works. And the Father shows Him in all things Himself and His works, and therein impels the Son to carry out and finish those works in redemption and judgment. The seer has momentary visions, shown him by the Lord ( Revelation 1:1; Revelation 4:1); in Christ the whole view of the world is an insight of the working of God, in which spiritual intuition and sensible vision are one. Christ moves in this living symbolism of the infinite, which in its essential elements the fourth Gospel opens to us; He hears and understands all the words of God, He sees and knows all the signs of God, and His total view of things concentrates itself in the guiding ἐντολή of the interior aim and spirit of His life.